It's time to bring back the lost art of the inspiring public information poster

Above my desk hang two posters by the artist MacDonald Gill. One is “The Wonderground Map of London Town”, the other the artist’s map of “Theatreland”. Through the long weeks of lockdown, with theatres closed, and taking the Tube as intrepid as a trek through the Hindu Kush, I looked at the maps again and again and went sightseeing in imagination. A serpent swims the Serpentine like a London Loch Ness monster. An acrobat turns cartwheels in Oxford Circus. At the Oval, a miniature cricketer hits a six. In the West End, banners fly from the domes of the Haymarket, the Garrick and the Coliseum. They are as richly decorated as medieval mappa mundi. In every inch a pun, a tease, a tiny vignette.

The maps were commissioned by Frank Pick, later the guiding genius of the London Transport Passenger Board. It was Pick who asked Edward Johnston to design a transport alphabet and Harry Beck to create a new Tube Map, still in use today. Pick believed that “moral and civic harmony could be achieved through integrating art and design with everyday life.” Gill’s Wonderground map was such a hit, reported the Daily Sketch in May 1914, that commuters would spend 20 minutes in front of the posters: “People watch so long, they lose their trains – and yet go on smiling.”

Would it were true of public information posters today. Since March, we have been assaulted by messaging. “Stay Home, Protect The NHS, Save Lives” in howling yellow and red. “Stay Alert, Control The Virus, Save Lives” in zombie yellow and green. Speed was of the essence. Clarity and compliance were all important. Graphic grace could go hang. In their baldness they had something of the stark urgency of the 1980 “Protect and Survive” campaign, advising households how to prepare themselves for a nuclear attack. No frills, no embellishments, no niceties of design. But we are now six months into the pandemic and the visuals remain dismal.

In shops, stations and in public spaces we are subjected to battery by hoarding. On the concourse of Victoria station, commuters who make it up to town are met with a barrage of posters, billboards, warnings, admonishments. The jaunty, the haughty, the finger- wagging and the just plain worried. Any and every typeface, colours from fluorescent to pastel. A deafening visual roar.

You may say that I sound like the princess who complained of a pea. That it is absurd to lament a lone legume felt through 20 mattresses when the castle itself is on fire. I say: the pea matters. Good design, as Frank Pick knew, is a moral good. Bad art harries, good art calms. And a joke goes a long way.

We are through – god willing – the worst of lockdown. We have got the message: wash hands, wear masks, stand a metre apart. Now we have the most wonderful opportunity to commission posters that not only reassure, but inspire. During the First World War when Underground passenger numbers fell steeply, Gill’s “Theatreland” was intended to remind Londoners that the theatres were still open, that fun was still to be had. Gill was glad to get the call. He called it a “jolly job”. That jollity springs from every corner of his poster. Spare us, though, from Transport for London’s idea of cheer: infant’s ditties that don’t scan. Wit is a question of spirit, not of naff gags and nonsense verse.

Give us the Vorticist daring of Edward McKnight Kauffer, the mischievous brio of Edward Bawden, the propulsive cool of Abram Games. When Games was 16 he used to walk from his home in the East End of London to life-drawing classes at the Royal College of Surgeons. He was dismayed by the posters he passed. “The general standard,” he later said, “was mediocre traditionalism.” As a poster designer, his battle cry became “maximum meaning, minimum means”. During the Second World War, he produced spare and haunting posters for The War Office. One, encouraging households to grow their own food, carried the line “Use Spades Not Ships” superimposed over the flat of a spade mirrored by the prow of a ship. Another, “Your Talk May Kill Your Colleagues” is chilling. The gossip of a loose-lipped soldier spirals out and bayonets three men. Once seen, never forgotten. His poster encouraging visitors to travel to London Zoo by public transport is a happier affair: a tiger made of the stripes and station roundels of the Tube map.

I’d love to see a modern Kauffer – who captured the Jazz age in asymmetry and silhouette – design a poster reminding us to wash our hands and make it seem a racy, thrilling act. Or demonstrate how to keep our distance while looking rakish and dapper. I’d love an update of Bawden’s “Map of the British Empire Exhibition”, ribbing us about our fear of crowds and showing how to be together hugger-mugger, but still leave space between.

There is a misconception, too, that for instructions to read loud and clear they must be written in haz-mat, hi-vis font. “Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives” is a case in point. But as the brilliant Barnett Freedman exhibition at Pallant House in Chichester shows, hand-lettering can be so much more human. A decorated alphabet speaks, but doesn’t bark.

The challenge is to coax us back to attractions, theatres and restaurants, while reminding us of the post-corona rules.

Adam Dant is a master maker of antic maps of London and the tribes who haunt its squares. He has an ear for city argot and an eye for the curious coincidences of history. What happened on this spot 100, 200, 500 years ago? Or how about the wickedly inventive John Broadley with his inky gift for costume and his cast of Dick Whittingtons, Elizabethans and Pearly Queens? The raffish anarchy of his mural of Old Soho, drawn for the walls of the Quo Vadis restaurant in Dean Street, strikes just the right chaotic, night-out note. Or a massive panelled poster by Beatrice Hasell-McCosh, a marvellous painter of trees, of palms at Kew, oaks in Hyde Park and hibiscus in Shoreditch?

I haven’t been on the Tube since the beginning of March, but a Dant or a Broadley or a Hasell-McCosh on the platform at Piccadilly Circus might just get me out the anxious traps and through the ticket gates.